Many aspects of the provision of medical care and the management of many aspects of the healthcare system now involve the use of computers and computer applications. For example, recent efforts have been made to move to electronic medical records (EMR). With clinical documentation systems moving to electronic media, clinical data may be available for incorporation into a number of different applications designed to assist in the management or use of such data. Computerized provider order entry (CPOE) is another example of a development that may improve the ability to electronically access information related to physician's orders. Many other applications are also being developed to utilize electronic information on people and processes to manage the provision of various aspects of patient care including the provision of predictive care.
As the availability of electronic clinical data is increasing, the demand for applications that utilize such data to provide information, guidance and services is also increasing. Many applications have been developed to assist hospitals, clinics, doctors, insurance companies, and other healthcare related service providers with various aspects of improving patient care and organizational management. However, decisions on what applications to employ and even what network infrastructure to adopt can vary widely depending on the needs and resources of each respective organization.
In certain environments, it may be preferable to centralize resources in one or more network servers and employ less robust (thin client) terminals to access the centralized resources. In these and some other architectures, a substantial amount of round trips of communication information between the client and server may be required in order to execute certain applications or communicate certain information. Firewalls, the implementation of network address translation (NAT) and other common network characteristics inherent in the architectures described above may tend to increase network latency. Although it may otherwise be useful at the server end to have information on network performance, status, resource utilization, user behavior and other client related data that may be referred to as “telemetry data”, the provision of such information may, in many cases, require yet further communication overhead, which may further increase network latency.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide an improved mechanism by which client telemetry data may be acquired in network based communications.